benedictevans - Benedict Evans

How do we think about a fundamentally unknown and unknowable risk, when the experts agree only that they have no idea?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agi

Generative AI means things that were always possible at a small scale now become practical to automate at a massive scale. Sometimes a change in scale is a change in principle.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/4/29/problems-of-scale-z7mrb

We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any�...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/4/19/looking-for-ai-use-cases

Can you write laws, or lay down ethical principles, for a technology that will be used in entirely different ways, for different purposes, in different industries? What does that mean if it’s c...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/3/23/the-problem-of-ai-ethics-and-laws-about-ai

Tech regulation gets a lot of headlines, and seems like a big deal, but most people in tech don’t seem to care much. It’s boring, and years away, but more fundamentally, it really doesn’t a...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/3/21/who-cares-about-tech-regulation

The Vision Pro is amazing, but like the rest of VR and AR, Apple seems years away from the mass market. And if it gets there, how much will it matter?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/3/17/a-month-of-the-vision-pro

The EU has finally made Apple redesign the App Store, 15 years after we started arguing about it, and no-one is happy with the result. In the next few years there’ll be a lot of shouting and so...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/1/31/remaking-the-app-store

I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/10/23/leaving-twitter

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them bac...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/10/5/unbundling-ai

If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/27/generative-ai-ad-intellectual-property

The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or wo...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/24/when-tech-says-no

ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consump...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/7/2/working-with-ai

What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro

What does Netflix have in common with Shein, and why is MrBeast more interesting than Disney Plus?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/15/netflix-shein-and-mrbeast

Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, re...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-think-about-amazon-advertising

The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, a...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/12/14/ChatGPT-imagenet

Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/10/31/ways-to-think-about-a-metaverse

For some companies, revenue is a feature.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/8/25/rocket-ships-and-tractors

The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to regulating competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC’s attempt to block Meta from buying Within is a test case for...

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/8/1/within-and-tech-mampa

The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/7/28/ways-to-think-about-e-commerce-penetration